[Click image to enlarge]"It's a labor of love," Tejeda said of the press last week at his South Side home, an adobe structure dating back to the Mexican Revolution. "But what other kind is there?"
The independent press, says Onofre, will be devoted to Chicano literature and arts.
"We want to publish books regularly and continuously by writers we admire," states Onofre, who is a poet and director of the writers-in-communities program at Gemini Ink. "It ties into my work with Gemini. I love working with writers."
"Tunaluna," the alurista collection, is the first in the press' Veter@nos series; plans are being made for a Nuevas Voces series (New Voices) and for a literary prize — the Aztlan Libre Press Premio en la Literatura Xicana.
Other irons in the fire range from a children's coloring book of animal symbols from the Aztec calendar and a chapbook of poems in three languages: English, Spanish and Nahuatl. A website has been launched at aztlanlibrepress.com.
Tejeda, founder of San Antonio's Tejano Conjunto Festival and director of the Conjunto music program at Palo Alto College, has devoted his life to the Chicano arts. It all began, he says, in 1975, in a class at the University of Texas at Austin, a poetry workshop taught by . . . alurista. Meeting once a week, first on campus, then in the teacher's or students' homes, students read and critiqued poetry and stories, made music and talked politics during turbulent times.
"alurista is considered the poet laureate of Aztlan," says Tejeda, retrieving a battered spiral-bound journal titled "Trece Aliens," his only remaining copy of a Xeroxed compilation of the class' output.
"This was the beginning," he says. "I've been involved in writing and publications, really, since my college days. It's been a dream of mine to start a press, and a couple of years ago, Anisa and I just said, ‘Let's do it.' So, now, it's sort of come full circle."
Serendipity played a role in the publication of "Tunaluna." Onofre discovered the poet's website one evening, and Tejeda — "I hadn't spoken to him in years," he says — dashed off an e-mail. A couple of weeks later, a typed manuscript arrived by mail. The would-be publishers were "amazed" — and a little giddy.
"We were a just-started-never-published-nada small Chicano press," says Tejeda, "and we might publish alurista's poems! He had published nine books, but nothing in about 10 years."
Another "interesting convergence" came when Chicago painter Judithe Hernández saw an Internet posting about the publication of the alurista collection and contacted Aztlan Libre Press about cover artwork.
"She had done the illustrations for alurista's first book ("Floricanto en Aztlan") in 1971," says Onofre. "She offered her beautiful artwork for the cover as a gift to alurista."
Small presses rarely place books on the best-seller lists, but their role is critical, says Bryce Milligan, publisher of San Antonio's Wings Press.
"The literary role of small presses in America tends toward discovery, resurrection and preservation — the discovery of new writers, the recovery of ‘lost' works, and making the noncommercial literary works of established and deceased writers available," says Milligan, who's been a sounding board for Tejeda and Onofre. "With their first book, Aztlan Libre Press has accomplished the third of these with a strong work by a pioneer of the Chicano literary movimiento. They've done solid, important, necessary work. As a San Antonio publisher, I could not be more delighted with both the book and the press. ¡Bienvenidos, Aztlan Libre!"
There is a touch of the old revolutionary spirit in the Tejeda/Onofre household, where the "compañeros" live with their 3-year-old daughter Maya, and where Aztlan Libre Press business gets done. Perhaps alurista, in a poem titled "Birdnests," captures its essence:
we
remain
standing
with our slingshots
in our hands
no goliath shall prevail.
To purchase "Tunaluna" by alurista ($15 plus $3 shipping) visit the Aztlan Libre Press Web site at http://aztlanlibrepress.com/. Several readings are planned in October, including UTSA (Oct. 5), Texas Lutheran University (Oct. 6) and Palo Alto College (Oct. 8).
Jesús Garza, "By the way... Aztlan Libre Press has a great website. Click here!"
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